Sociolinguistics

Facultad de Lenguas
y Educación
 Sociolinguistics

Following Yule, in The Study of English, “The term sociolinguistics is

used generally for the study of the relationship between language
and society. This is a broad area of investigation that developed
through the interaction of linguistics with a number of other academic
disciplines. It has strong connections with anthropology through the
study of language and culture, and with sociology through the
investigation of the role language plays in the organization of social
groups and institutions. It is also tied to social psychology, particularly
with regard to how attitudes and perceptions are expressed and how
in-group and out-group behaviours are identified.” (Yule, 2010, p.
254)

Sociolinguistics 2
“Sociolinguistics is concerned with language in social and
cultural context, especially how people with different
social identities (e.g. gender, age, race, ethnicity, class)
speak and how their speech changes in different
situations. Some of the issues addressed are how features
of dialects (ways of pronouncing words, choice of words,
patterns of words) cluster together to form personal styles
of speech; why people from different communities or
cultures can misunderstand what is meant, said and done
based on the different ways they use language.
Sociolinguistics encompasses a range of methodologies,
both quantitative and qualitative”.

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Language is one of the most powerful emblems of
social behaviour. In the normal transfer of
information through language, we use language to
send vital social messages about who we are,
where we come from, and who we associate with.
It is often shocking to realize how extensively we
may judge a person's background, character, and
intentions based simply upon the person's
language, dialect, or, in some instances, even the
choice of a single word.

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For example, sociolinguists might investigate language
attitudes among large populations on a national level, such
as those exhibited in the US with respect to the English-
only amendment--the legislative proposal to make English
the 'official' language of the US. Similarly, we might study
the status of French and English in Canada or the status of
national and vernacular languages in the developing
nations of the world as symbols of fundamental social
relations among cultures and nationalities. In considering
language as a social institution, sociolinguists often use
sociological techniques involving data from questionnaires
and summary statistical data, along with information from
direct observation.

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A slightly different concern with language and society focuses
more closely on the effect of particular kinds of social situations
on language structure. For example, language contact studies
focus on the origin and the linguistic composition of pidgin and
creole languages. These special language varieties arise when
speakers from mutually unintelligible language groups need a
common language for communication. Throughout the world,
there are many sociohistorical situations that have resulted in
these specialized language situations--in the Caribbean, Africa,
South America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. In examining
language contact situations, it is also possible to examine not
only the details of a particular language but also the social and
linguistic details that show how bilingual speakers use each
language and switch between them.

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Another approach to language and society focuses on the
situations and uses of language as an activity in its own
right. The study of language in its social context tells us
quite a bit about how we organize our social relationships
within a particular community. Addressing a person as
'Mrs.', 'Ms.', or by a first name is not really about simple
vocabulary choice but about the relationship and social
position of the speaker and addressee. Similarly, the use
of sentence alternatives such as Pass the salt, Would you
mind passing the salt, or I think this food could use a little
salt is not a matter of simple sentence structure; the
choice involves cultural values and norms of politeness,
deference, and status.

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It is also possible to examine how people manage their
language in relation to their cultural backgrounds and their
goals of interaction. Sociolinguists might investigate
questions such as how mixed-gender conversations differ
from single-gender conversations, how differential power
relations manifest themselves in language forms, how
caregivers let children know the ways in which language
should be used, or how language change occurs and
spreads to communities. To answer these questions
related to language as social activity, sociolinguists often
use ethnographic methods. That is, they attempt to gain an
understanding of the values and viewpoints of a
community in order to explain the behaviors and attitudes
of its members.

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The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is
variable and changing. As a result, language is not
homogeneous — not for the individual user and not within
or among groups of speakers who use the same language.

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Putting It in Context

Considerations other than grammatical correctness often

govern speaker choices. For example, sign this paper is a
grammatically correct imperative sentence. However, a
student approaching a teacher to obtain permission to
drop a course, for reasons having nothing to do with
grammar, will probably avoid the imperative — expressing
the request instead as a statement or a question, such as I
need to get your signature on this paper or Will you please
sign this drop form?

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Some social factors are attributes of the speaker — for
example, age, gender, socio-economic class, ethnicity and
educational level. Many studies have shown that these
factors commonly correlate both with variation within the
language itself (such as the pronunciation of final
consonant clusters) and with variation in the use of
language (such as the use of more or less formal
vocabulary, depending on the audience). These findings
match our everyday experience; most people are well
aware that men and women use the language differently,
that poor people often speak differently from rich people,
and that educated people use language differently from
uneducated people.

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People adjust the way they talk to their social
situation
It is common knowledge that people also adjust
the way they talk to their social situation. Socio-
situational variation, sometimes called register,
depends on the subject matter, the occasion and
the relationship between participants — in addition
to the previously mentioned attributes of region,
ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age and gender.
Here are some examples.

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• Constraints on subject matter vary from culture to culture. In
American English, it is fine to ask a child or a medical patient, “Have
you had a bowel movement today?” However, the same question to
an acquaintance might be coarse. Even a good friend would find it
at the least peculiar. American English speakers must approach
other subjects with care. They wouldn’t dare ask, for example, “Are
you too fat for one plane seat?” “What’s your take-home pay?” “Are
you sure you’re only 50?” “Do you have a personal relationship with
Christ?”
• Any of these questions posed at a cocktail party might draw a prompt
“None of your business” — or something less polite. However, in other
situations, between other participants, those same questions might be
appropriate. A public-health official encouraging Americans to lose weight
might well ask a general audience, “Are you too fat to fit in one plane seat?”
A financial planner speaking to a client certainly should ask, “What is your
take-home pay?”

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Contact

Contact is an important concept in sociolinguistics —

social contact and language contact. Language change
spreads through networks of people who talk with one
another. Tight-knit groupsthat keep to themselves tend
not to promote change. Networks whose members also
belong to other networks tend to promote change. People
can live next door to one another and not participate in the
same network.

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Contact between languages brings about variation and change.
Situations of language contact are usually socially complex, making
them of interest to sociolinguists. When speakers of different
languages come together, the results are determined in large part by
the economic and political power of the speakers of each language. In
the United States, English became the popular language from coast to
coast, largely replacing colonial French and Spanish and the languages
of Native Americans. In the Caribbean and perhaps in British North
America where slavery was practiced, Africans learned the English of
their masters as best they could, creating a language for immediate
and limited communication called a pidgin. When Africans forgot or
were forbidden to use their African languages to communicate with
one another, they developed their English pidgin into their native
tongue. A language that develops from a pidgin into a native language
is called a creole. African American Vernacular English may have
developed this way.

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Bilingualism is another response to language contact. In
the United States, large numbers of non-English speaking
immigrants arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Typically, their children were bilingual and their
grandchildren were monolingual speakers of English.
When the two languages are not kept separate in function,
speakers can intersperse phrases from one into the other,
which is called code switching. Speakers may also develop
a dialect of one language that is heavily influenced by
features of the other language, such as the contemporary
American dialect Chicano English (Mexican-American
English, is a dialect of American English spoken primarily
by Mexican Americans).

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Dialect

Sociolinguists also study dialect — any regional, social or

ethnic variety of a language. By that definition, the English
taught in school as correct and used in non-personal
writing is only one dialect of contemporary American
English. Usually called Standard American English or
Edited American English.

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Social dialects or sociolects
• Whereas the traditional study of regional dialects tended to concentrate on
the speech of people in rural areas, the study of social dialects has been
mainly concerned with speakers in towns and cities. In the social study of
dialect, it is social class that is mainly used to define groups of speakers as
having something in common. The two main groups are generally identified
as “middle class,” those who have more years of education and perform non-
manual work, and “working class,” those who have fewer years of education
and perform manual work of some kind.
• In Edinburgh, Scotland, for example, the word home is regularly pronounced
as [heɪm], as if rhyming with name, among lower-working-class speakers,
and as [hom], as if rhyming with foam, among middle-class speakers. It’s a
small difference in pronunciation, but it’s an indicator of social status. A
more familiar example might be the verb ain’t, as inI ain’t finished yet, which
is generally used more often in working-class speech than in middle-class
speech.

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 Sociolinguistics

Turn Taking

Sociolinguistics 19
Style

• Speech style

• Speech shifting

• Prestige

• Speech accommodation

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Speech style

The most basic distinction in speech style is between

formal uses and informal uses. Formal style is when we
pay more careful attention to how we’re speaking and
informal style is when we pay less attention. They are
sometimes described as “careful style” and “casual
style.” A change from one to the other by an individual is
called style-shifting.

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Prestige
In discussing style-shifting, we introduced the idea of a “prestige” form as a way
of explaining the direction in which certain individuals change their speech.
When that change is in the direction of a form that is more frequent in the
speech of those perceived to have higher social status, we are dealing with overt
prestige, or status that is generally recognized as “better” or more positively
valued in the larger community. There is, however, another phenomenon called
covert prestige. This “hidden” status of a speech style as having positive value
may explain why certain groups do not exhibit style-shifting to the same extent
as other groups. For example, we might ask why many lower-working-class
speakers do not change their speech style from casual to careful as radically as
lower-middle-class speakers. The answer may be that they value the features
that mark them as members of their social group and consequently avoid
changing them in the direction of features associated with another social group.
They may value group solidarity (i.e. sounding like those around them) more
than upward mobility (i.e. sounding like those above them).

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Speech accommodation

As we look more closely at variation in speech style, we can see that

it is not only a function of speakers’ social class and attention to
speech, but it is also influenced by their perception of their listeners.
This type of variation is sometimes described in terms of “audience
design,” but is more generally known as speech accommodation,
defined as our ability to modify our speech style toward or away
from the perceived style of the person(s) we’re talking to. We can
adopt a speech style that attempts to reduce social distance,
described as convergence, and use forms that are similar to those
used by the person we’re talking to

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• In the following examples (from Holmes, 2008),
a teenage boy is asking to see some holiday
photographs. In the first example, he is talking
to his friend, and in the second example, he is
talking to his friend’s mother. The request is
essentially the same, but the style is different
as the speaker converges with the perceived
speech style of the other.
• C’mon Tony, gizzalook, gizzalook Excuse me. Could I
have a look at your photos too, Mrs. Hall?

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Register

Another influence on speech style that is tied to social identity

derives from register. A register is a conventional way of using
language that is appropriate in a specific context, which may
be identified as situational (e.g. in church), occupational (e.g.
among lawyers) or topical (e.g. talking about language). We
can recognize specific features that occur in the religious
register (Ye shall be blessed by Him in times of tribulation),
the legal register (The plaintiff is ready to take the witness
stand) and even the linguistics register (In the morphology of
this dialect there are fewer inflectional suffixes).

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Jargon

One of the defining features of a register is the use of jargon,

which is special technical vocabulary (e.g. plaintiff, suffix)
associated with a specific area of work or interest. In social
terms, jargon helps to create and maintain connections among
those who see themselves as “insiders” in some way and to
exclude “outsiders.” This exclusive effect of specialized
jargon, as in the medical register (e.g. Zanoxyn is a
nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis, bursitis and
tendonitis), often leads to complaints about what may seem
like “jargonitis.

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Slang

Slang, or “colloquial speech,” describes words or phrases that are used

instead of more everyday terms among younger speakers and other groups
with special interests. The word bucks (for dollars or money) has been a
slang expression for more than a hundred years, but the addition of mega-
(“a lot of”) in megabucks is a more recent innovation,along with dead
presidents (whose pictures are on paper money) and benjamins (from
Benjamin Franklin, on $100 bills). Like clothing and music, slang is an
aspect of social life that is subject to fashion, especially among
adolescents. It can be used by those inside a group who share ideas and
attitudes as a way of distinguishing themselves from others. As a marker of
group identity during a limited stage of life such as early adolescence, slang
expressions can “grow old” rather quickly.

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Older forms for “really good” such as groovy, hip and super were
replaced by awesome, rad and wicked which gave way to dope,
kickass and phat. A hunk (“physically attractive man”) became a
hottie and instead of something being the pits (“really bad”), the next
generation thought it was a bummer or said, That sucks!. The
difference in slang use between groups divided into older and
younger speakers shows that age is another important factor
involved in social variation. However, the use of slang varies within
the younger social group, as illustrated by the use of obscenities or
taboo terms. Taboo terms are words and phrases that people avoid
for reasons related to religion, politeness and prohibited behavior.
They are often swear words, typically “bleeped” in public
broadcasting (What the bleep are you doing, you little bleep!) or
“starred” in print (You stupid f***ing a**hole!).

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